There had been much talk that this would be the first 'digital' General
Election, but traditional media still had the biggest role to play

Before the election, all the talk online was that digital campaigning would bring swaths of younger people away from Facebook and their keyboards on to the streets to canvass voters, and to nudge them into the polling booths. Put simply, that didn’t happen.

Yet one single email from William Hague was enough to raise £100,000 in small donations for the Conservative Party. In all, the party’s web campaign brought in more than £500,000. Sites such as YouFund.me.uk, however, which aimed to help candidates such as Nigel Farage and Antony Calvert to unseat the likes of John Bercow and Ed Balls, did not achieve their ambitions.

And in truth, while many thought the web would provide a wealth of back-channel communication, it turned out largely to be activists and diehards shouting at each other. It was an often unedifying spectacle, and sometimes a bad advert for the politicians themselves who, by and large, stayed above the personalised fray, even during the TV debates. More importantly, the number of people who sent a tweet with the tag “ukvote” – just 25,475 – was barely 30 per cent of the population of a single, typical UK constituency.

There are, however, two areas in which the election broke new ground, and both had as much to do with media technology as with politics.

High-profile bloggers, such as Iain Dale and Tim Montgomerie, found their opinions sought by the mainstream media, and generally acceded to requests for comment.

Would they have been so forthcoming to other blogs if asked? Some would, but this campaign showed that some new media, at least, are content for now to acknowledge the power of the old. Guido Fawkes, aka blogger Paul Staines, reckoned that only when his opinions were picked up by the Sun did they reach a mass audience.

Second, the single biggest trend for all political parties was the bypassing of the mainstream media altogether. It would be easy to say that the Tories got so much support from the press they didn’t need to do much more, but in fact they spent about £40,000 on taking over YouTube’s front page, so that eight million people saw their films on election day. And Labour, let’s not forget, used YouTube so that Gordon Brown could get his message across without media interference.

As Britain’s new coalition government settles in, it will be interesting to watch two strands of technology vie for supremacy: openness with data sits neatly with transparency in politics, but YouTube and Facebook lend themselves to propaganda. Perhaps it is just this dichotomy that prevented the internet election from ever really taking off.